


ceasefire

by McEnchilada



Category: Frasier (TV)
Genre: Arguing, Coming Out, Enemies to Lovers, Gay Frasier, M/M, Relationship Negotiation, a new era of cooperation, in a very literal and binding sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 10:53:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17527406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McEnchilada/pseuds/McEnchilada
Summary: "Dad, are you crazy? She's a Winston! She's probably just leading you on so she can break your heart! That's exactly the kind of thing Cam would do to hurt me."missing scene from s9e20, "The Love You Fake"





	ceasefire

They were on their eighth draft of the Treaty of Elliot Bay Towers, Apartment 2001—Cam having outright vetoed the suggestion that Frasier be granted the first shot at holiday party scheduling, in exchange for his coveted bath blend—when Frasier finally broached the subject they’d both been so studiously avoiding.

“I suppose we ought to talk about what happened between us,” he said, perfectly vague, without looking up from the legal pad. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cam drain his fourth sherry.

“No, I don’t think so.” Cam spoke smoothly but quite briskly, feigning a complete nonchalance as he picked through their crumpled past efforts. “Here, let’s revisit draft three; I think you were a little hasty to dismiss my idea about the farmers’ market.” It hardly took a trained psychiatrist to spot his discomfort.

Frasier raised a finger in warning. “First of all, the day has yet to dawn that I would allow anything to compromise my access to locally grown, heirloom Brandywine tomatoes, and that is my final word on the subject. Second—” He presented a stern glare which had quelled many a reluctant patient on his couch. “—we cannot simply go on ignoring the situation.”

“Actually, I think we can,” Cam countered. He stood up, empty glass in hand, and hurried towards the kitchen. Earlier, Frasier had smugly reflected on the impracticality of having one’s kitchen, the heart of the home, so closed off from the rest of the apartment, but as Cam ducked through the door, he had to concede the appeal. What apartment didn’t need another means of egress from a conversation one wished to avoid? Not that a door would stop Frasier, or this discussion.

Frasier stormed into the kitchen, full of righteous determination. “Ignoring what happened won’t change the fact that it _did_ happen. I insist that we speak about it.”

Cam gave him a look over his shoulder from where he stood rummaging through the cabinets, and huffed in annoyance. “I fail to see what good it will do to discuss the event. Why linger on it?” As he arranged crackers on a tray alongside a jar of artisanal fig preserves, he cautioned, “Don’t make it more than it was.”

“I don’t even know _what_ it was,” complained Frasier, far too aware of how plaintive he sounded.

“It was sex, Crane.” Cam’s sonorous voice _dripped_ with that sarcastic Winston superiority.

“I _know_ it was _sex_.” Operating on the assumption that Cam’s kitchen would parallel his own in arrangement as well as layout, he opened the drawer nearest to him and, sure enough, unearthed an appropriate cheese knife just as Cam finished their small cheese board with a little log of goat cheese. Were Frasier arranging refreshments in _his_ apartment, he’d have added a bowl of nuts, or prosciutto if he had it handy, but he supposed this was adequate. Barely. “What I don’t understand is what the hell you meant by it!”

Truth be told, Frasier couldn’t say what he’d meant by it, either. He’d been midway through a second sleepless night, stewing over his trouncing at the condo board meeting. The offending flag had been removed, to the accompaniment of a trumpeter bleating out the anthem, but the stripes had seemed blazed into Frasier’s eyelids, haunting him. Cam’s distinctive tread had resounded overhead late into the night, which Frasier was certain had to be deliberate. Martin had been almost as smug as Cam was, crowing all day long about how right he’d been, and how handily Cam had managed to make him look like an idiot. Everyone he’d passed in the hallway had glared at him for his unpatriotic remarks, when the day before more than one person had confided that they’d been in support of his banishment of Cam’s absurd humvee to the sub-basement!

Was it any wonder, then, that Frasier had stormed upstairs, sometime past midnight, determined to have it out with his obnoxious neighbor? He’d been humiliated, mocked, manipulated, and treated as though _his_ demands had been unreasonable! Frasier Crane knew himself to be a vain man, and a man of exacting standards, and a man perhaps too sensitive to slights, but in this case _he_ was in the right, as he’d been fully intending to demonstrate when he pounded on Cam’s door.

It hadn’t exactly gone to plan.

Cam brushed past him without giving a reply, forcing Frasier to trail after him, back to the living room. He was unnervingly good at that: keeping Frasier off-balance and running to catch up. While Frasier worked himself into a red-faced fury, scanning for an opening, Cam just lounged back on his checkered couch, smirking. To call him infuriating would be a gross understatement.

“Now _look_ ,” Frasier snapped, taking a firm stance with his arms akimbo. “I am not leaving this apartment until we have discussed this matter like two reasonable, mature adults. So I suggest you start talking, buster!”

“Me? You were the one who showed up at my door, that night.”

“Only with the aim of having a frank conversation about your blatant disrespect towards me, with your flag and your behemoth of a vehicle. _You_ , sir, kissed _me_.”

The accused hummed thoughtfully, spreading some cheese onto a cracker. “Brandywine tomato, Brandywine tomahto. I remember it differently.” Frasier pursed his lips in furious frustration at this continued affectation of nonchalance. Uncontrite, but perhaps weary of the confrontation, Cam sighed. “What do you want me to say here, Crane? I don’t care for you, you don’t care for me. We had sex once, and won’t be doing it again. Unless you’re going to propose we go steady?”

“Of course not,” said Frasier. The very idea of anything _romantic_ between them was appalling. “Though if _you’re_ harboring a secret affection, it would explain all of your pigtail-pulling.”

“ _My_ pigtail-pulling?”

“Yes, _your_ pigtail-pulling. What else do you call it when you deliberately schedule every New Years and Halloween party to coincide with mine?”

“I call it fixed dates on the calendar, and at least people attend my parties.”

“I suppose if you measure the success of a soiree by the quantity and not the _quality_ of your guests—”

“Stop.” Cam cut him off with a lordly gesture. “This isn’t getting us anywhere, and we _were_ negotiating a ceasefire. Have some cheese.”

Frasier, chastised, acquiesced, and for a few minutes the two of them sat together on the couch, silent except for the crunching of their crackers. It wouldn’t be comfortable in any event—they might have many points in common, on a surface level, but their differences ran too deep for any real friendship to flourish—but it was made even less so by the preoccupation still roiling like smoke in Frasier’s mind. He’d have vastly preferred to share it with virtually anyone other than _Cam Winston_ , but in the circumstances...he feared there could be no other confidante. 

The bitterness of making himself vulnerable, to _him_ of all people, was almost impossible to speak around. It wasn’t until Cam picked up the legal pad again, signalling his readiness to resume peace talks and curtail further conversation on the subject of that unexpected event, that Frasier finally brought himself to say, “It isn’t really _you_ I was looking to get more clarity from.”

Cam paused, pen poised over a fresh page. “Oh?” he asked warily.

“Yes, well, you see, that night was...quite a surprise for me. I had never, uh.” He waved vaguely between the two of them. Cam’s eyes followed the gesture, which also took in the breadth of the couch on which the liaison had taken place. With his darker skin, it was hard to be certain, but Frasier told himself that he wasn’t the only one blushing. Hastily, he finished, “With a man.”

“Oh,” Cam said again. His eyes, still following Frasier’s hand as he raised it to tug at his tie, widened in belated surprise. “Wait, do you mean you’re not…?” He trailed off, but it wasn’t hard to guess the missing word.

“Well, I hadn’t thought so.”

“But you _seem_ so—” This time he cut himself off more sharply, which Frasier tried to feel grateful for.

“Yes, so I’ve heard.”

“And you—well, you remember, that night, you...” 

Well, _that_ was certainly an evocative hand motion. “There is a first time for everything.”

“Had you really never considered you were...”

“Let’s give complete sentences a try, shall we?” Frasier interrupted peevishly. He jerked to his feet and began pacing around the couch. It served to work off some of his anxiety and, just as importantly, let him hide his scarlet face. “No, I didn’t realize that I’m gay, or bisexual, or whatever I am. I’ve been quite content with the women I’ve been with, thank you. It’s never come up before now. So I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when, two months ago, in this very room, it did!”

“Yes, I imagine it was something of a shock,” Cam agreed, so calm and so reasonable. He reached for the glass of sherry on the table—Frasier’s, he wanted to point out, since Cam had left his in the kitchen—and took a contemplative sip. He looked completely unruffled, while Frasier felt like he was on the brink of hysterics. _Infuriating_.

Frasier turned on his heel, so he didn’t have to look at that handsome face, that goading eyebrow and sardonic mouth. He stalked towards the curtained windows. Hah, Cam didn’t even make the most of the natural light the room received!

“Most people, I believe, make such discoveries as teens, or young adults. Tumultuous times, yes, but at least they can boast of the flexibility of youthful minds! Their sense of self remains mutable, easily bending to accommodate new ideas. But for me, a man long past la joie des jeunes, to be suddenly faced with the understanding that I didn’t fully understand _myself_ , and to find myself questioning every attraction, every impulse I have ever acted upon—! If I wasn’t who I had always thought I was, who could I then be? Who would Frasier Crane be, if not himself?”

He knew he sounded melodramatic. There was a curious comfort in piling on the florid words and the excessive sentimentality. It took him back to his school days, when an articulate enough essay could disguise even the flimsiest thesis in a veneer of eloquence. Perhaps, if he said enough, he’d be able to bury the very real fears he was describing beneath so much overwrought nonsense that no one would remember they were even there.

“For weeks, I struggled with myself in absolute silence, without a soul to confide in. And you just _carried on_ blithely, as though nothing had happened, and before I know it, your mother is spending her nights right down the hall from my room!” He twisted back around. “Do you understand why I would deem it necessary for us to actually talk about what happened?”

Cam met his glare with a look of such genuine sympathy that Frasier felt himself deflate at once. He sat down heavily on the couch, leaning into the corner so he could slouch the full length of his defeat. Cam topped up the sherry and passed it over without another word. “Oh, it isn’t your fault. You’re right; neither of us is the other’s favorite person. I can’t have expected you to want to think about it afterwards. I suppose I just need to talk about it, process it a little.”

“Well, as you so pithily put it on your little show, I suppose _I’m listening_.” Did Cam listen to his show? Frasier made a note to ask about that later. “But there must be someone you could speak about this with whom you don’t have an ongoing feud. Your brother? Your father?”

“No,” Frasier answered, without even considering it. Not just because of the irony that it had been with Cam Winston, whose name he’d cursed a hundred times. There wasn’t a man on Earth that Frasier would have been able to tell his father about. Oh, of course he knew Martin loved him. Was proud of him, even, sometimes. He could probably learn to live with it. But Frasier could picture, with perfect clarity, the way profound disappointment would look on his face. The relationship they’d only been able to build since he’d moved back to Seattle would be broken beyond repair. He thought he could handle everyone else’s discomfort and distasteful jokes, but Martin’s shame would crush him. “No, I couldn’t speak to my father.”

He was shocked when Cam laid his hand on Frasier’s knee, a simple gesture of comfort he’d never have expected of the man. He tipped his head back to stare up at the ceiling, so he wouldn’t stare at that point of contact. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father as relieved as when I came home from medical school with my first wife,” he confessed. “He realized pretty quickly that she was a loon, but at least she was a woman.”

“I’m sorry,” Cam said quietly. He sounded like he meant it. “My father and I had our differences, but he was happy for me, when I told him I was gay. He even went with me to a few Pride parades. Even had a sign that read, ‘Sorry, boys, my son’s the gay one.’”

“Yes, well.” Frasier cleared his throat and rubbed at his suddenly itching eye. Itching, not watering. Cam and his accepting parents. Always trying to show him up.

Sensing that the moment was over, Cam removed his hand and turned his attention to tidying up the cheese plate. “So, Crane, was that the clarity you were looking for?”

Was it? He wasn’t sure if he’d actually gotten any answers. It had done him good to talk about it aloud, certainly, but was anything any clearer. He knew, undeniably, that he was attracted to men, but he’d learned that the last time he was here. He knew he couldn’t tell anyone about it, least of all his father, but he’d learned that lesson by the time he was in fifth grade. He knew that, despite an apparently mutual attraction, he and Cam agreed that they’d make a disastrous couple, but he’d learned that practically the day Cam had moved into Elliot Bay Towers.

Tonight, he’d learned that Cam was capable of expressing sympathy, and that he’d been willing to listen. He’d learned that they could, perhaps, negotiate. 

“It’ll do for now,” Frasier answered, setting down his sherry and making the decision not to let his mind linger. “Now, shall we return to the allowances of our noise abatement policy?”

Cam flipped through the notepad to find their nearly finished draft of section C, but then a thought seemed to strike him. “Wait. My mother hasn’t been spending the night at _your_ apartment. They’re both here for breakfast practically every morning.”

“That’s impossible. Daphne just picked up your mother’s brand of cereal at the grocery store today.”

“Believe me, your father in a bathrobe, emerging from my mother’s bedroom first thing in the morning, is an image I am unlikely to forget.”

For a moment, they stared at each other, trying to puzzle out their parents’ double-booked breakfasts. Frasier snapped his fingers as the answer occurred to him. “They’re using their relationship to force _us_ to get along! In fact, I’d wager they’re _faking_ their relationship to force us to get along.”

“That seems rather an elaborate pretense,” Cam said skeptically. “I can’t see my mother coming up like a plan like that, for something so trivial.”

“It’s precisely the kind of plot my father would get into his head. Honestly, the complex little plans that man comes up with, you’d think my apartment was the stage for a commedia dell’arte. There’s always something complicated going on, that could be solved with just one or two straightforward conversations.” Frasier shook his head despairingly, recalling the many, many farcical plots to which apartment 1901 had been witness. “Mark my words, this is his doing.”

Cam tossed the legal pad onto the coffee table, knocking a few early drafts onto the floor. He stretched his arms along the back of the couch, his hand just brushing Frasier’s shoulder. “Mother has been chiding me about how well she’s sure the two of us would get along, if we’d only give it a shot.”

“Yes, Dad has, as well.”

“Hah. If only they knew.”

“Yes.” Frasier didn’t mean to catch Cam’s eye. He didn’t think Cam meant to hold his gaze. The air felt very heavy, the way it had _that night_. Then, they’d been shouting. Now, they both seemed to be holding their breath. “If only they knew.”

Cam moistened his lips and said, in a voice suddenly bright and somewhat strained, “You know, Crane, since our parents do seem to be getting on so famously, partners in crime and everything, I think we ought to make an effort to do the same.”

“Yes, I concur!” His own voice held, perhaps, some notes of desperation. They were both wearing smiles of almost manic politeness, both on the edge of snapping.

“We owe it to them to try our best.”

“Certainly we do. We’re good sons, after all.”

“Yes, yes. So, let’s begin by getting to know each other better.”

“After all, intimate knowledge is a crucial part of true friendship.”

“Then shall we adjourn to the bedroom, to begin improving our friendship?”

“I’ll race you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I promise I'll write one where Frasier actually does come out to his dad, instead of just thinking about how disappointed Martin would be (spoiler: Martin is capable of being chill)
> 
> Cam is much too handsome for Frasier to date but, honestly, the man's at least as petty as Frasier is, and Frasier's demands in "Mother Load" were absolutely reasonable. You can't park a hummer in a parking garage, Cam!!!


End file.
